The purpose of the present paper is twofold. First, it describes zero-coupon yield curve estimates for Germany from September 1972 to February 1996 using a variety of curve-fitting procedures. Second, these estimates are examined for their information content regarding future inflation. The...

The paper introduces the Deutsche Bundesbank's new procedure for estimating the term structure of interest rates. It describes the basic methodological approaches used (Nelson and Siegel, 1987, and Svensson, 1994) and some fundamental concepts which are important for estimating and interpreting...

Increases in firm default risk raise the default probability of banks while decreasing output and inflation in US data. To rationalize the empirical evidence, we analyse firm risk shocks in a New Keynesian model where entrepreneurs and banks engage in a loan contract and both are subject to...

We study the equilibrium properties of a business cycle model with financial frictions and price adjustment costs. Capital-constrained entrepreneurs finance risky projects by borrowing from banks. Banks, in turn, make loans using equity and deposits. Because financial contracts are not...

This paper proposes a tractable financial accelerator New Keynesian DSGE modelthat allows for closed-form solutions. In the presence of financial frictions, theNew Keynesian Phillips curve features a flat slope with respect to the output gapand is strongly forward-looking. All shocks cause...

This paper proposes a tractable financial accelerator New Keynesian DSGE model that allows for closed-form solutions. In the presence of financial frictions, the New Keynesian Phillips curve features a flat slope with respect to the output gap and is strongly forward-looking. All shocks cause...

In a three-region New Keynesian life-cycle model calibrated to Germany, the Euro area (without Germany) and the rest of the world, we analyze the impact of population ageing on net foreign asset and current account developments. Using unsynchronized demographic trends by taking those of Germany...

This paper uses a time-varying vector autoregressive (VAR) model for the euro area to explore the changes in the interest rate pass-through to bank retail rates following conventional and unconventional monetary policy shocks. The median estimate of the impulse responses shows a considerably...

This paper explores the impact of low (but) positive and negative market interest rates on euro area banks' net interest margin (NIM) and its components, retail lending and retail deposit rates. Using two proprietary bank-level data sets, I find a positive impact of the level of the short-term...

I propose a new term structure model for euro area real and nominal interest rates which explicitly incorporates a time-varying lower bound for nominal interest rates. Results suggest that the lower bound is of importance in structural analyses implying time-varying impulse responses of yield...